Downtime February 7th

I noticed you being down of course and I see the menus are a little different.

One change that I'm wondering if you should consider is this. When I go to the menu items it takes us to the active topics but I usually don't want that. I always have to make the additional click to get to the list of forums or groups because that's the way I usually find is the navigation I want. After that, I would normally pick the next area I want to get to or see what's currently active. Maybe it's just my personal preference and perhaps that choice is available at the user level and I just haven't looked hard enough?

Not a big thing but just a thought. Do you have the capacity to run simple polls on preference questions like that?

Just a question... you've mentioned that you would like people to post more but have you considered how far they have to drill down to do that?

Click one... arrive at Coulee Region Home page. Opening view... a banner, three more banners and an advertisement... (whether or not post's appear will depend on how I have my font size set. I usually see the top three posts) Scowl down to the posts and check out the recent posts and maybe decide to go to one.
Click two... arrive at a posted topic. Comment there. Decide you want to start a new post.
Click three... choose Discussion forums. Arrive at another page of recent posts. Choose 'new topic' or do what I do, try to navigate to the catagory by going to 'View all Forums'.
Click four... View all forums, choose the category.
Click five... Debates and hot topics, one of my favorites.
Click Six... New topic There, now I can start!

I know, I'm weird, and I probably think weird, but that's the typical way I get from "Say, I should start a new thread about this", to where I actually start typing my message. In relaying this, I see where I could take some shortcuts and maybe it just takes learning some new ways of interacting with forums (on my part) than what I'm used to, but it seems that the candy's not being put on the bottom shelf where the kids can reach it, but up where you have to actually work to get at it.

You've also mentioned that very few people drill down into the forums, and again, I've noticed that there are other ways to arrive at a place to post which are shorter but I seem to overlook. I've learned to navigate this site and I post, but I have to say that the navigation is quite different than what I was used before.

I hope I'm not coming across as critical or that anything needs changed, but I wonder if others, not familiar with the way this site is constructed, might be getting lost 'on the way to the forum' as I seem to do sometimes?